Revere Rather Than Fear

residing in the divine kindom here on earth
would be like if we dared to love this life
blessed with an affirmation of sacred worth
which precludes a power over causing strife
so that we worship with gratitude that dear
relation where fear is replaced with revere
and God the groom conjoins with we the wife

magnify your goodness o holy one through us
as through virgin mary simple peasant woman
at conception but then evolved to theotokos
the world worshipped womb of the son of man
the holy whirl descends and plants the seed
in your people conceived to believe in need
of god born in us as we should cause we can

from the face of the deep in time and space
come undulations of the first primal scream
out of holy ground of being source of grace
unfolds in a scheme of the demiurge to deem
a divine hubris of delusions of omniscience
revealed thru consequences of concupiscence
infinitely more than god could ask or dream


That isn't a typo in the first line of the first stanza; the kindom is the official term that we use over at Canadian Memorial United Church. It sounds more like one big happy family rather than a herd of suffering serfs. The first stanza was inspired by the "womb of creation" section of my contemplative wisdom circle theme of the week, which to me is about appreciating nature, the feminine, the here on earth rather than waiting for all rewards in the after life. The other part is from an essay by Thomas Merton on the Power of Love, which I discovered this week. (There are times when I get the urge to go check out the "new arrivals" section of Pulp Fiction, the second hand book store because there is something waiting for me. I never know what it is until I get there. This time it was "Disputed Questions" by Thomas Merton. )

The whole asceticism and corrupted love that permeates the Christian Mysticism is what I want to address. However, that will have to wait for another blog post. I'm stalled at reviewing the number of times fear the lord is used in the Psalms, which is the oldest section of the Hebrew bible, and if this fear and revere difference was in the original or if it entered during translation from the oral to the written. The issue of literacy and left brain dominance is worth a few blog posts. The old testament seems to be centered around fear and obedience, whereas Jesus talked a lot of fearing not, and it wasn't until the later church fathers that Christianity picked up the obedience meme BTABP. As is the issue of the function of religion being a tool by the ruling class to control the masses; I think Marx got this one right, but only in its dysfunctional form and not how it has to be. BTABP.

The second stanza was inspired by a prayer from Bruce's latest book If Darwin Prayed:Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics which was launched today. The prayer is the first one from the section on Advent which starts this week. The first line of the prayer just happened to be forty three characters long, and the second was as well if you add the virgin modifier. The theotokos reference comes from a short discussion at the book autographing and it fits in with the womb of creation theme. The rest of the stanza corresponds to the remainder of the prayer, though a lot is implicitly embedded because you can only fit so much in one box. For example, I originally wanted to have the whole world worshipped but it was too big so I had to suffer the frustration of not having the whole which made the subsequent holy whirl less satisfying than I had originally anticipated. But you have to go with what fits in or you never get anything done. There is a bit of a tempo change making me think there needs to be some more stanzas between the first and second.

The third stanza was written a couple of years ago and I tacked it on the end because it fit with the creative struggle of emergence, back to before there was matter to now when everything matters so much. It was originally supposed to be part of a larger work on the creative spark talked about by Jakob Bohme. My inner muses kept telling me that if I could assimilate the essence of the Aurora and translate it into Ovian stanzas it would be way impressive. it is also quite intimidating and I got overwhelmed into immobility which is a common occurrence with us ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) folks. BTABP. I liked the use of concupiscence as the rhyming end of a line and that at one time it was a highly spiritual term before it was corrupted by the nihilists. I don't think they had high regard for creation, the bringing into existence of something that never was before. Not at all like mere reproduction and manufacture. Creation is a messy process. It requires a dynamic tension and struggle. In the end it is often in the spaces that are between that the final product emerges. Some day the spaces between will get filled in and these three stanzas discarded for something better, or added on to, or perhaps transformed. But this is all I'll say about this now.

[last edited Nov 21]